


Comes in Threes

by Verbyna



Category: Sherlock (TV), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Siblings, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Family, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Pre and Post Reichenbach, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 17:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fixer, the consultant, the quartermaster: one by one, the Holmes brothers become state secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comes in Threes

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to jedusaur for the read-through, and to my girlfriend for the enthusiasm. This one's for her.

_The youngest was the most loved_  
The youngest was the shielded  
We kept him from the world's glare  
And he turned into a killer 

\- Morrissey, ‘The Youngest Was the Most Loved’

 

Q learns that the youngest child is supposedly the one with the most desire to show off, and the one most likely to have an inferiority complex. Something about being coddled, the parents’ last shot at steering offspring in the direction they would’ve preferred for all their issue.

He was three years old when Mycroft moved to London, so he didn’t enjoy the relative freedom of Sherlock’s early years. He was fifteen when Sherlock’s drug problem first became common knowledge in the family, so he didn’t enjoy Mycroft’s relative freedom to pursue goals as he saw fit in his teenage years.

Mummy does not coddle him, having written off child-rearing as a bad job. Sherlock and Mycroft, terrifying as they may be, learn to respect him as the whipping boy who grows up paying for their digressions.

He keeps his head down and grows up a Holmes, because it’s the only card he was handed.

 

*

 

Kinford leaves university halfway through his third year.

Mummy is not pleased, so she cuts him off financially. He expected as much, and he has three separate bank accounts that no one knows about. The money did not exist until he coded it into existence over the course of several aimless weeks before he dropped out.

It worries him that he can get things like offshore accounts past Mycroft already. It’s not that Mycroft is all-knowing, or even that his network of informants and access to several geek squads could turn anything up - those accounts are untraceable in the legal grey area where Mycroft operates. It’s just that Sherlock and Mycroft, working together, would trace the hack back to him in a matter of hours if only they could get over their animosity.

Kinford left breadcrumbs for them. They didn’t follow, so at twenty, he’s on his own.

 

*

 

Irene Adler hires him to cover her tracks when he’s twenty-one. She’s not based in London yet, so it will be another four years before he meets her in the flesh. By then she’s in love with Sherlock, and Q (he will be Q soon enough, just watch) isn’t surprised by this development.

She makes it her job to be admired by people who should know better. Sherlock knows better and he still admires her, so really, it’s a wonder no one seems to realise what it’s doing to her until she’s too far gone to get out cleanly. Mycroft tells him it was her heart rate that gave her away to Sherlock. Her _pulse_ , dear god.

For all their accomplishments, Mycroft and Sherlock can be quite thick.

Mycroft sees assets and Sherlock sees crime, danger, bodies alive or dead as if they’re one and the same. Kinford (not Q, yet) knows that people are hardware and software that’s evolved to work in networks.

He looks for glitches. He always, always finds them, because he could’ve designed a better system - not that he ever says it out loud. He’s not _Sherlock._

 

*

 

One of Q’s earliest memories is of M coming to take Father away so he could rest in a place where none of the staff would bring him alcohol of the non-medicinal sort. Q wasn’t supposed to be at home, but the nanny came down with the flu and he stayed in that day.

He watched the entire sorry affair from the top of the stairs. Mummy’s hand was trembling on his shoulder as his father and his aunt argued. When the orderlies finally seized him, the silence became deafening.

Sherlock was out hunting for clues about the boy who’d drowned, but when he came home, Q couldn’t tell him about the silence and the ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looked at Sherlock and saw Father, if only he replaced mysteries for drinks, a violin for a hunting rifle.

So loud, both of them. So unlike him and Mycroft.

Sherlock becomes an excellent fighter and a consummate drug addict, trying to make sense of small slices of the world because the whole glittering gutter of it is too much for him. Mycroft protects England and eats to fill whatever hollow’s left, trading in secrets like their own currency. Kinford customises weapons and controls the flow of information for actual profit, and drinks his milky tea unsweetened.

 

*

 

He doesn’t sleep until his head’s swimming. Chronic exhaustion, Sherlock explains in both medical detail and personal anecdotes, is as serious as the word “chronic” implies. Q takes precautions after that, though he never thanks his brother for the concern.

Q doesn’t build his image like a disguise or a patchwork of hints for any particular kind of person to decipher. He knows what he looks like, and it can’t be weaponised. Mycroft despairs of him.

He avoids the authorities for as long as he can; it’s only a matter of time before he’s recruited, with a name and a brain like his. He needs this time to prepare, so he’s not swallowed without a trace by Queen and country later.

To be truly indispensable to Britain, he practices being indispensable to entities with more resources and fewer moral considerations. The pay is exponentially better, not that he needs the money.

 

*

 

His file, when M finally recruits him at Mycroft’s polite request, is ominously thin. A flimsy little thing detailing how he dropped out of university despite his many achievements, a clean criminal record with a separate list of known associates from his younger days, a surveillance photo on one of the few mornings when he attempted jogging: certainly not enough for him to be offered a job.

She allows him to peruse it before she turns her laptop around to face him and shows him the real file, which is substantially larger and reasonably thorough. (He could do better.) Still, it adds up to twenty to twenty-five years, parole in twelve, no internet connection ever again. (He did worse.)

“Your position here is not a given, Kinford. I will not hear of preferential treatment, do you understand?”

He nods; he expected no less. “What’s the test?”

M smiles an awful close-lipped smile. “You have twenty minutes to clean up your file before it enters the system. If it passes muster, you’ll begin work in Research and Development on Monday. If it does not, whatever is left will put you in jail. Begin.”

It takes him nineteen and a half minutes to hack his record clean. He goes back to his flat to sleep after he’s dismissed, but the shivers don’t subside until he climbs out of bed to read John Watson’s latest case report.

It puts things in perspective, being a Holmes and seeing it through the eyes of an outsider. His brother’s boyfriend, or whatever Watson is, probably knows as much.

 

*

 

It feels like he trained himself for black ops and ended up in basic, or what passes for basic at this level. It’s not so much climbing the ranks as it is being promoted because his superiors keep asking him to brief their own superiors in their place: eventually, everyone cuts the middleman.

Two years and a meteoric rise into his career in espionage, Kinford reports only to Q, Tanner and M. There should be more resentment in the ranks, but working in Q Branch means everyone’s seen him on a coding spree or tested one of his experimental guns at some point.

He works with some of the Double-Ohs, but never with M’s favourite. Moneypenny, Q’s favourite operative, says that Bond is the best. She says he loves his job to death, and Q translates that to mean that 007 will die of it before Q has a chance to meet him. More’s the pity.

 

*

 

The trouble with Moriarty is that he’s like them, but without the dubious luxury of having been raised surrounded by people who understood him. Sherlock knows it, Mycroft knows it, Kinford knows it, and if they see it, Moriarty likely does, too.

They play the same game by different rules. None of them can win.

Irene disappears, and even though Kinford (not Q, but near enough) knows that she’s still alive by the transactions in the emergency account he set up for her all those years ago, he can’t tell anyone. After a while, it looks like Sherlock is in contact with her. He stops moping quite so much and goes back to work.

But then Sherlock’s reputation is ruined. Moriarty shoots himself - can’t live with the glittering gutter of the world without Sherlock’s mind to balance it out. And Sherlock -

Q doesn’t go to the funeral. He accepts the silent comfort of whiskey in M’s office, spares a moment to be grateful for MI6’s need-to-know policy on last names in Q Branch, and goes back to his flat.

Mycroft comes knocking forty-eight hours later. Anthea, his assistant, herds Q into the shower.

“I’m not going,” he tells her. “I’m _not_ going,” he repeats to Mycroft when he’s wrapped in towels and herded back to the bedroom like a child.

Mycroft sighs. “You don’t exist anymore. None of Sherlock’s associates are aware of you, and legally speaking, you can’t be there without breaching your contract.” He tilts his head to the bed, where a new laptop is humming like a beacon of sanity. “I took the liberty of arranging a secure feed of the ceremony, should you wish to watch it privately.”

“And if I don’t?” Q asks, speaking to his brother instead of the government. “What if I don’t want to see, because he was stupid, and he was wrong, and he made me watch him jump? He knew I was watching. He _knew_ I’d see him hit the ground.”

“Don’t watch it, then. I simply provided options.”

 

*

 

Soon after that, the list of NATO operatives embedded in terrorist organisations is lost. M’s playing a game of survival. Tanner looks worried all the time, so Q does his best to help - he sleeps even less, eats whatever the interns give him, and gets on with damage control.

 _Take the shot,_ M said. Moneypenny takes a desk job after Bond dies, and when she thinks no one’s looking, she looks down at her hands like they’ve betrayed her.

The bomb goes off on the day M was supposed to admit defeat and retire. _Think on your sins,_ the message said, but Q (promoted on his predecessor’s death in the blast) has to wonder which sins the attackers were referring to. The only one M seems to care about is not completing the mission.

 

*

 

The new headquarters, being underground and disused for years, have rats at first. Interns stop shrieking and go a-hunting after a couple of days, and Q’s first executive decisions as Q are punctuated by the sounds of dying rodents and bloodthirsty congratulations.

They take comfort where they can. He leaves them to it.

Bond comes back from the dead and Q gets to meet him after all. He finishes the documentation for Shanghai the evening before and spends the morning working on the new firewall at his flat before heading to the National Gallery. That’s why, when Bond looks like he’ll dismiss Q for his _age_ of all things, Q can’t help but play. He likes Bond, with his sharp suit and his utter certainty of his usefulness.

“Good luck out there in the field,” Q tells him before they part ways. “And please return the equipment in one piece.”

He can hear Bond’s “Brave new world” as he walks away, and finds himself smiling: he’s inclined to smile at anything that refuses to stay dead because it’s more useful when it’s alive. He wouldn’t mind if everything in his life functioned that way. He could innovate instead of coming up with replacements for everything, from opsec guidelines to bullet specifications.

 

*

 

Q also likes Mallory, mostly because Moneypenny enjoys working with him.

Life in Churchill’s bunkers would be miserable if Q’s only friend there couldn’t trust her boss, especially when she’s stopped beating herself up over Bond’s supposed death at her hands. It’s not that she’s not perfectly professional, because she is. It’s just that she’s the best at whatever she’s doing when she’s not second-guessing herself, and it shows.

He dearly hopes he won’t have to meet Mallory personally in the near future, since the only reason for that would be abject failure on Q’s part, and possibly termination of his contract. Also, from what he’s heard, Mallory is a _normal person._ At MI6, an organisation that employs such characters as himself, M, Bond, and the former quartermaster, a man who routinely bugged Q Branch’s break room to avoid human interaction while staying up to date on the gossip.

Will wonders never cease.

 

*

 

Silva is completely right and completely wrong at the same time.

Before 007, M spent years in Hong Kong. She would send Mummy gifts for Q - hard drives, cryptography puzzles with low-clearance profiles of hackers on MI6’s rosters as the egg. Well chosen and well suited to Q’s interests, but not without ulterior motive.

Silva calls her _Mummy_ with the sort of bitterness that means he really saw her as a maternal figure before protocol dictated his usefulness had been played out. It’s not wrong of him to feel betrayed by the version of M he made up in his head, but the flesh-and-bones version (Q’s flesh and bones) is only here to do a job.

Q relies on Bond to pull the trigger, or not. Bond said it best: it’s hard to know which in his pajamas.

Silva expected to rely on the MI6 for more than guidance in the field and technical support, and he lost his mind over the idea of comfort that was never offered, available, or implied. Maybe Q should pity him, but there’s no excuse for wilful ignorance.

 

*

 

Mallory lives up to Moneypenny’s endorsement, and Q clears the path that eventually leads M to her death.

The obituary is written by Mallory, who transitions to being M without a hitch. The funeral is an official affair, one that Q can attend on account of his name. He thinks he spots someone over the top of M’s red-white-and-blue draped coffin, but when he looks again, there’s nothing there.

MI6 return to Vauxhall within the week, and Q gets his team the basement. They work best when the only light they get is electronic; he even manages to set up their digs to the floor plans from the bunker, where he’s in the centre, right where they can see him.

Every time Tanner comes down, there’s a second where Q still thinks of him as a line to the person who forced him to fulfill his potential on the right side of the law. He grew out of jumping whenever a tall man with dark, curly hair walks in front of him, so he’ll grow out this, too.

 

*

 

Am at your flat. Come in at your earliest convenience.

\- MH

 

Sherlock is _dead._ M is dead, long live M. Since he’s been Q, Kinford has personally (if remotely) killed forty-three people. Death is permanent, unless your name is James Bond and you refuse to die lest you’re drawn and quartered in the presence of witnesses and impartial physicians.

Mycroft tells him that there’s a chance (minuscule, bordering on negligible) that Sherlock might have survived the fall and performed the most Holmesian act of all: disappearance.

Q is a ghost, Mycroft is invisible on penalty of termination for persistent whistleblowers, and Sherlock is a zombie.

Mummy isn’t pleased.

 

*

 

Bond takes to his office about as well as can be expected, which is to say, he cashes in on his rapport with Q to spend his off hours in the basement when he’s not in the field.

“She left me that awful porcelain bulldog,” Bond says one night, firing shot after shot through the solar plexus of a paper target. “Moneypenny suggested it was a hint that I should get a desk job.”

Q snorts and sets down the box of exploding bullets, watching Bond as he empties the cartridge and refills it with something more entertaining. “Not quite,” he says, though he probably shouldn’t.

“Oh? You disagree with our esteemed mistress?”

“She’s not my mistress,” Q says. “Shoot, I do have a reason for being here.”

There’s a lull in the conversation until the dust has settled on the floor at the far end of the room. Bond huffs an appreciative laugh, then turns to Q.

“Alright, so she’s not your mistress, but you disagree with her. Is it because you’ve known M for so long?”

Q has a gun trained on Bond in the same amount of time it takes Bond to realise his mistake. He taps the underside of Bond’s jaw with the barrel as he takes stock of how he’s feeling - it’s like being the voice in Bond’s ear in the field, he decides. Like he’s all that stands between Bond and death, save the man’s instincts.

“She’s not my mistress either,” Bond says. He’s still smiling.

“Whatever you think you know about me and M, you need to stop thinking it,” Q says, barely keeping the smile off his own face. It’s a hysterical reaction; his hands are steady, but his mind’s groaning on its hinges. “I didn’t know her except as my boss.”

“It’s alright,” Bond says. “Neither did I.”

Bond took her to Skyfall - she died in his arms in his family’s chapel, where Bond was baptised. Q knows that Bond’s telling the truth. They were both _hers_ in a way that his father never was when she argued with him with the orderlies on standby. They were aces up her sleeve. They were assets, and unlike Silva, they could bear it.

 _Queen and country,_ Q thinks, and puts the gun down.

 

*

 

Watson is waiting for him in his living room. Behind Watson, sitting on Q’s sofa, is Sherlock.

“You look good for someone who died a year ago,” Q says. “You don’t appear to be crawling with insects in the family plot, for one.”

“Kinford,” Sherlock says in his steadiest big brother voice.

“It’s Q,” Kinford says, wishing with startling clarity that Bond was here. “How did you like death? I’ve heard it’s quite bracing.”

“Q,” says Watson, looking between the two of them like he’s itching for his service weapon.

“No, no, I really am curious. I work in espionage. I love information.”

Sherlock draws a deep breath and expels it. Q can’t get over the fact that _he’s breathing_ , what the fuck is wrong with them. “I had to go away for a while,” Sherlock tells him, “there were people after me. I came back as soon as I could.”

“No,” Q says, stepping into the room and to the side so he’s not blocking the door for Sherlock and Watson’s escape. “Do you even know what Mycroft and I deal with every day? You barely register. You and your little villains, always chasing each other. I could’ve fixed your problems with two minutes and a sat phone. Mycroft could’ve fixed it with a _text message._ You just chose the easy way out.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Sherlock says. “I was -”

“Pining for Watson, here?” Q interrupts. “No, you just saw Irene,” he says, ignoring John’s double-take, “and you thought she was onto something. The difference is that she left me breadcrumbs so I didn’t have to mourn her. You weren’t _protecting_ us. We have operatives for that. You were proud.”

“I did what I had to do,” Sherlock counters. He’s been walking towards Q and now he’s standing in front of him, new lines around his eyes, hair as dark and unruly as ever. “Is it too much to ask that you’re happy I’m alive?”

“Ask me again in three months,” Q tells him and Watson both. “Don’t contact me until then, and don’t you dare fall off the grid in the meantime. Sherlock, I swear -”

“Mycroft would have me skinned.”

“He’d let me finish you off,” Q says, and Sherlock says, “I know.” He doesn’t apologise.

Neither of them brings up Mummy, or the public. Sherlock is still dead.

 

*

 

Ten weeks later, Bond’s falling asleep with a leg carelessly thrown over Q’s thighs when Q feels a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to talk.

‘Careless’ is what they call sleeping with an asset one’s handling, too.

“What is it?” Bond asks, noticing the shift in mood.

“Do you know I have brothers? M’s file might’ve mentioned them.”

Bond wraps himself around Q like the world’s most emotionally attuned sex worker. He deserves a medal for that alone, Q thinks through the sickening lurch of his stomach. Something shiny to put in storage.

“You have two brothers. That’s all I know. What’s brought this on?”

“One of them is a civil servant. He’s - M got him out when he was eighteen. Father was still drinking, it was before the stroke, and I suspect he’s half the reason M was called back from Hong Kong and offered the job.”

Bond takes this in. Q can feel his pulse; he can feel Bond slotting the pieces together.

“The other one just came back from the dead,” Q adds when his voice has sufficiently recovered. “He brought down a criminal empire when he died, you know. He used to play the violin when I had nightmares.”

“The civil servant,” Bond says, wondering. “He’s the civil service, isn’t he?”

“Do you know who he is? Who I am?”

“You’re my quartermaster,” Bond says, entirely free of irony. It’s a feat, with both of them naked and the strange turn the evening’s taken.

“I suppose I am,” says Q. “But I’m also a ghost in the machine.”

“It’s a good thing you built it, isn’t it?”

 

*

 

“Welcome back,” Mycroft tells Sherlock.

Mummy’s got her hawk eyes trained on Q, though. “What’s taken so long?”

“He was busy,” Sherlock says, and takes a seat at the dinner table. “We’re all safer when he’s busy.”

Q has a lot on his plate: a terrorist threat with links to the CIA, Moneypenny’s increasingly terse demands for a report on the finalised rehaul of the security protocols, Bond’s next mission. It’s a year since M’s death tomorrow; he’s twenty-eight and he’ll likely die before he reaches Bond’s age. Bond himself is considering retirement, which is staggering.

“Lots of computers to fix,” he says mildly. “Someone has to do it.”

Across the table, Mycroft nods at him with an almost imperceptible smile. They eat in silence.


End file.
